FRENCH CANADIANS

Of the role of French Canadians in the Great
Plains two things are certain. Their impact
was significant but their legacy is tenuous. Despite
some toponymical traces, historical
memory of them is disappearing.

The French Canadians were among the first
Europeans to contact the First Nations of
the Plains, initiating commercial activity
and contributing to early understanding of
the geography of the region. In the seventeenth
century, French Canadian men, seeking
adventure, wealth, and freedom from the
restraints of colonial society in the valley of
the St. Lawrence, headed west, reaching the
Great Plains by the early eighteenth century.
In times of French and British predominance,
the availability of this choice irritated European
administrators and visitors, who resented
the French Canadians' clear spirit of
independence.

The territorial interest and trading activity
of France in North America changed significantly
at the end of the War of Spanish
Succession. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713),
the French withdrew from Newfoundland
and most of Acadia and acknowledged English
control of the Hudson's Bay watershed.
Threatened by the strategic losses in the Gulf
of St. Lawrence, and hemmed in by the Thirteen
Colonies and the English on Hudson's
Bay, French explorers and traders diverted
their activity to the Western Plains.

The travels and trade of the La Vérendryes
exemplify this new orientation. Born in Trois
Rivières in 1695, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes,
the Sieur de la Vérendrye soldiered in France,
then returned to Canada. In 1726 he engaged
in the fur trade north of Lake Superior. In the
1730s and 1740s he and his sons traveled farther
west, reaching the lower Saskatchewan River
and Missouri River, in present-day North Dakota.
In 1742 his sons Louis-Joseph and François
crossed the Plains, probably reaching
present-day Wyoming and certainly returning
by way of present-day South Dakota.

As French coureurs de bois, then voyageurs
after the British conquest of Canada, French
Canadians were the proletariat in the fur trade
economy. They worked as canoemen, transporting
European goods west and pelts east,
and labored as guides, interpreters, porters,
traders, negotiators, and intermediaries between
the Native peoples and Europeans. The
expeditions of Peter Pond, Alexander Mackenzie,
Lewis and Clark, and John Charles
Frémont, among others, depended upon
French Canadians' muscle power, as well as
their invaluable practical understanding of
the climate and environments of the region
and the languages and cultures of the Plains
peoples.

One notable French Canadian impact was
the creation of the Métis, a unique syncretic
and Indigenous Plains people who were
the offspring of French traders and Native
women. The Metis, who combined Christian
and Native spirituality and spoke a mix of
Ojibwa, Cree, and French languages, lived,
traveled, and traded mostly in the Canadian
Plains. They were displaced by the disappearance
of the buffalo and the development
of the agricultural frontier in the late nineteenth
century. Resisting such change, their
greatest leader, Louis Riel, praised as a visionary
or excoriated as a traitor, might better be
seen as the personification of this cultural synthesis.
Riel was executed at Regina on November
16, 1885, only days after the driving of
the last spike of Canada's first transcontinental
railroad. The contribution of Riel and his
people remains a source of deep controversy.

French Canadians never perceived the
Great Plains primarily as a place of settlement
and always preferred regions closer to home.
Quebec did experience important internal
and external migration of population between
1850 and 1930, and some French Canadians
moved west to the Prairie Provinces. Most,
however, chose the comfort of contiguity, either
in Montreal or regions such as the Laurentians,
the Saguenay River, and the Gaspé
Peninsula. Beyond Quebec thousands went to
the industrializing towns of New England or
the lumbering regions of Ontario.

Some directed movement to the Prairie
Provinces was sponsored by the Roman Catholic
Church and individual clergymen, partly
to attract French Canadians away from the
lure of a multireligious and unilingual United
States. While even today scattered French Canadian
agricultural settlements exist in the
provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta,
their rate of assimilation to the prevailing
English-speaking culture is the highest
of any of the French-speaking minorities in
Canada.

Assimilation of French speakers in Canada
outside Quebec is a serious concern, and it is
especially critical in the west. The Francomanitobain,
Fransaskois, and Franco-albertain
minorities continue to make heroic efforts to
preserve their French language and culture.
While the absolute number of French speakers
in Canada, not including Quebec, is increasing
slightly, their proportion to the even faster
growing English-speaking majority is in decline.
In the mid.twentieth century, they
comprised 7.25 percent of the total population,
while by 1996 they were only 4.5 percent.
With smaller numbers and a more dispersed
population in the Canadian West, the pressure
of assimilation there is even greater. One measure
is the percentage of those who attend
French-speaking schools. Despite the constitutional
rea.rmation of their right to education
in French and the creation of education
divisions and construction of more schools
since the 1980s, as of 1996 in the Prairies only
about 16 percent of those who had the right to
do so actually attended such schools. In Manitoba,
where their population is more concentrated,
about 4,500 students, or slightly less
than 30 percent of the school-age Frenchspeaking
minority, are taught in their own
language. Farther west, these percentages decline
dramatically to 12 percent in Saskatchewan
and less than 8 percent in Alberta.

Historical literature on the French Canadians
in the Great Plains is uneven. Despite
some admirable academic studies of specific
aspects, mostly focusing on Canada, to date a
comprehensive synthesis of their experience
in the Great Plains region does not exist. Material
written in French in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was mostly
mythological, stressing heroic explorers and
saintly churchmen. Now frequently written by
local enthusiasts, contemporary material in
that language is often anecdotal and genealogical
in approach, as well as antiquarian and
nostalgic in value. Substantial historical writing
of the Plains in English, both in the United
States and Canada, often refers only slightly to
French Canadians. Lack of familiarity with the
language of that minority hampers western
historians' access to the French-speaking part
of the history of the Plains. Given the danger
of the assimilation of the French Canadians in
the Great Plains and the present condition of
current scholarship, one may well wonder if
such a history will ever be written.